Nieman Lab Math Points to Attention Gap

Good Monday Morning Math over at Nieman Lab.

Writes Martin Langeveld:

"Surprise.

All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way."

Martin runs some fair numbers on print newspapers sold, number of pages read, minutes read per day and more to get at some apples-to-almost-apples comparisons to web page views.

I do think he's hit a nail on the head.

There's still a huge Attention Gap, between print readers and online readers. Even the New York Times can barely get to 40 minutes a month online and most dailies struggle to get to 10. Minutes. Per Month. (Check out Jen Saba's latest monthly tally on dwindling time spent. "Many sites still maintain single-digit averages for an entire month.")

The web is a great short-read medium, and shows signs of growing into more. For most readers though -- not journalism insiders -- it's not something with which they spend a lot of time.

So, as Martin points out, maybe the fact that newspaper companies are taking in 10-15% of their revenues from online ads is high, given online usage compared to print. But, hey, why not get some of the gravy train of online advertising, the fastest-growing (recession aside) part of the ad pie. 

All that said, I think his numbers could be revised a little. Given that we've all got much less to read in print -- at least 20% drop in pages and stories over the past several years -- I think 10-12 minutes a weekday is a better estimate than 25. His overall point, though, still holds and reinforces a central tenet here. We’ve seen the beginnings of hugely disruptive technology, both on the ad and reader sides, but the economic devastation of newspapers is much more due to ad disruption than reader disruption.

Comments

[Mark]

Nieman is making some pretty aggressive assumptions to get to this number. Every paper has more than two readers who all read 24 pages per day? Really?

Does that include all of the people who forget to stop their subscriptions when they go out of town? Or the ones who take the paper just to do the crossword? Or the businesses that keep untouched papers in their waiting rooms?